Found inner peace: Noelle Reno says meditation helped her to cope with her ex-fiance Scot Young's death

Bluntly, one would forgive Noelle Reno if she were a wreck. Remarkably, she isn’t.

Just over a month ago the 31-year-old American beauty appeared, hidden behind dark glasses, to testify at the inquest into the death of her ex-fiance, Scot Young, 52, who was found impaled on railings below the window of their London penthouse last December.

Quite aside from the nightmare that followed, including sinister suggestions of foul play and a Russian mafia ‘hit’, it transpired that the months that preceded Scot’s death were not easy, either.

Yet today, despite all the chaos that still surrounds her, Noelle, puffing gently on an e-cigarette as we chat over coffee, is astonishingly calm – healthy-looking, toned and tanned after a break in Ibiza with girlfriends. How can it be so?

I have known her for more than a decade and seen her weather numerous storms – a failed engagement to American banking heir Matthew Mellon, the two businesses that faltered after investors let her down. She is open about it all. But she will not talk publicly about Scot. It is, she says, too private.

She does, however, feel compelled in the wake of such tragedy to share her surprising coping strategy in the hope that she can inspire others. The thing that kept her going during what she admits have been her darkest times is not alcohol – indeed, she ‘barely drinks at all’ – or prescription drugs, but meditation.

While it may conjure up images of flower power and hippies, in fact, the modern version of the ancient Eastern practice is essentially a form of brain training aimed at helping us cope with anxieties and worry.

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It is as effective a treatment for depression as drugs, according to highly respected medical studies, and is even offered on the NHS, which calls it ‘mindfulness therapy’. Whatever the name used, it amounts to the same thing: sitting quietly, focusing on breathing calmly and little else for a short time.

As Professor Mark Williams, a clinical psychologist at the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, says: ‘People have real problems, but research has shown that brooding about them triggers a cycle of stress and depression that can skew our perspective and make the things that bother us seem even more difficult to deal with.

‘Still my best friend’: Noelle pictured with ex-fiance Scot just weeks before he died

‘Mindfulness isn’t about pretending everything is all right but learning to take a step back from whatever is bothering you. After a break, when you come back to thinking about the sources of your worries, they can seem more manageable.’

Noelle has dabbled in spirituality since her days as a model in Los Angeles. She was introduced to it by Mellon, who was at the time going through a messy divorce from Tamara, the former boss of luxury shoe brand Jimmy Choo.

Noelle’s interest was reignited about a year ago, shortly before her relationship with Scot ended.

‘When you go through tough times you learn to invest in yourself and ultimately you have to learn to love yourself,’ she says. ‘I’ve had to go through a lot of crap in my life, but finally I can say I have come through the worst of it and I truly love myself.

‘I think meditation came to me at a time when I needed help in my life because I wanted to change things. Ultimately it prepared me for what happened to Scot and helped me to cope with the trauma at the end of last year. It gave me the skills to deal with all the drama and the fallout afterwards.

SCIENCE PROVES YOU CAN BEAT BLUES IF YOU PUT MIND TO IT

There is no alternative treatment for anxiety and depression with as much scientific weight behind it as meditation.

Decades ago, experts began exploring just how it might help, and recently new scanning techniques have been able to show in detail just how the areas of the brain involved in worry and pain become dampened after just a few weeks of meditation-type exercises. The effect is at least as powerful as, if not better than, antidepressants. A medicalised version, known as mindfulness therapy, is offered on the NHS. Some people prefer this approach as it dispenses with the philosophical side in favour of simple ‘brain training’ exercises.

Psychotherapy referrals can take time, but the internet is a great way of accessing the world’s most renowned mindfulness and meditation teachers at home, for free. Of course, all that sitting around won’t be for everyone and there are other ways to achieve the effect – sportspeople, dancers and musicians talk about ‘flow’, when you get so absorbed in an activity that you almost forget you are doing it.

It’s the same thing – by focusing on something other than our worries, we give the mind a break and find everything becomes a little easier to cope with.

The brain is malleable – just as you can worry yourself sick, you can think your way out of it.

'I was actually able to be very calm at the inquest, even though the whole thing was a media circus. I am at peace with what has happened in my life and meditation has enabled me to get to this point. It has given me the skill to heal everything else that wasn’t right in my life. I’ve made peace with Scot and what happened thanks to meditation.’

At the time she began practising meditation again, she was still living with Scot and had recently featured in the Bravo reality TV series Ladies Of London, which pitched a handful of well-to-do Brits against brassy Americans keen to make it on the London social scene.

She says it was a negative experience – but one that kickstarted a desire to do something more fulfilling. ‘I wanted to be empowered and strong. I thought it would give me that but it didn’t at all. That was my old life, and I never want to go back to that,’ she says.

‘At the beginning of 2014, I took a real look at myself. I wasn’t happy and I knew there needed to be a shift and that I needed to instigate it. I had to change in order for my life to change.’

She started watching meditation ‘classes’ on YouTube. In these audio clips, a teacher makes leading statements intended to help halt worry and internal mental ‘chatter’, as like they might in a real-life class. Noelle says: ‘It took time to learn how to quiet my mind. But I’ve now got to the point where I can meditate on my own without needing a guide.’

No doubt her new-found calm was tested to the limit in the months before Scot’s death. The couple were separated but living together. And he had been very unwell.

The property tycoon, once worth £400 million but declared bankrupt in 2009, had been suffering paranoid delusions, triggered by bipolar disorder. He feared Noelle was conspiring to have him murdered, the hearing was told. The final, terrible showdown came when Noelle demanded he moved out of their luxury flat – his alcohol and drug binges, and failure to take medication, were fuelling his long-running psychiatric problems. She had reached breaking point.

Horrifically, Noelle was on the phone to him, pleading with him to see sense, in the moments before his death. ‘I’m going to jump – stay on the phone, you will hear me,’ he threatened. She called the police, but it was too late.

Just over a month ago the 31-year-old American beauty appeared, hidden behind dark glasses, to testify at the inquest into the death of her ex-fiance, Scot Young, 52, who was found impaled on railings below the window of their London penthouse last December

The coroner ruled out foul play, but would not call it suicide as there was ‘inconclusive evidence to determine his state of mind when he died’. Scot’s daughters, from his first marriage, Scarlet, 22, and Sasha, 19, were adamant that their father did not kill himself. To add to Noelle’s woes, Scot’s ex-wife Michelle, 51, who divorced him after an eight-year and very public legal battle, is now said to be selling her ‘explosive’ story to Hollywood film producers.

Before all this, at the beginning of 2014, Noelle decided she would travel the world, visiting a new country once a month – inspired by Eat, Pray, Love, the 2006 memoir by American author Elizabeth Gilbert.

‘It was life-changing,’ says Noelle. ‘I started with Istanbul. I’ve visited Morocco, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Hungary. The travelling enabled me to let go of my fears and open up. I just thought I’m going to get there, physically and emotionally, and I found a new confidence.’

She has also turned to a more unusual alternative therapy – Reiki, a kind of laying-on-of-hands approach. Noelle had sessions with healer Susie Anthony who, she claims, ‘cured my migraines.

Reiki is all about shifting energy. It has really helped me’. More recently, she has quit a heavy smoking habit. ‘I’ve had eight lives, and I hope I’ve got another to go,’ she jokes. ‘It’s why I stopped smoking. I have just started to love my life and I don’t want to do anything to harm it. Giving up was really, really hard, I won’t lie. But I knew that I had to.’

She is currently preparing to launch The Digital Shopping Channel, an online store which she calls ‘QVC for the millennial generation’.

Noelle claims she would never have conceived the idea or got the business off the ground without her new-found inner peace.

‘My company would not be here had it not been for meditation. It has given me great courage and now it feels like my mission to do positive things. The motto of the new company is Let’s Make People Happy. I believe the essence of energy is based in love and joy. Doing what you love will make you happy. I was living a fear-based life for years, worrying about the future and reminiscing about the past rather than being in the present.’

Noelle, who says she is a ‘raging co-dependant’, says she hopes to meet Mr Right and insists she has no regrets: ‘I chose unhealthy relationships because I was unhealthy. Now I’ve changed my life and I have a healthy relationship with myself so I know I am going to bring a healthy relationship into my life.

‘I’ve no doubt I am going to have an incredible love life and a great business because I have found true love and happiness.’